The movement is fueled by two disparate beliefs: 1) that commercial software
is the result of a corrupt and unredeemable development process, leading to
purchasing decisions based more on under-the-table deals than purely technical
merits (the paranoid rationale), which would serve to level the playing field;
and 2) that government will save huge sums of money by adopting open-source
software, thereby leading to lower taxes (the
right-wing-bordering-on-libertarian rationale).

Of course, both of these rationales are fallacies. First, every major
government computer project (at least in my home state of Minnesota, where my
governor can beat up your governor) is released for bid, with a list of
specifications that every vendor must meet. The paranoiac in the open-source
community would like to believe that Microsoft wins a lot of government
business by bribing decision-makers, but the fact is that it's the larger
resellers and system integrators�Dell, EDS, IBM, Unisys�who win the big
projects; Microsoft just doesn't have the resources to win major contracts on
its own, and you generally don't see a request for bid limited to only the
operating system. Mandating open-source technologies doesn't level the playing
field: it eliminates the playing field. Secondly, open source doesn't equal
free software. Linux developers are entitled to make a buck just like everyone
else, and to assume that huge savings can be realized by mandating that
Slackware Linux be used instead of Microsoft Windows is a rather simplistic
approach to understanding how an enterprise (which, in terms of scale, is what government is)
adopts and purchases software.

And there's one larger issue to address: the fact that it's probably not a
good idea to involve government in the software marketplace. It's one thing to
acknowledge that government is a large customer of software (indeed, it would
be intellectually dishonest to acknowledge that the government-funded
educational world hasn't done yeoman service in promoting open-source
technologies), but it's another thing to turn government into an advocate. For
this same reason many in the open-source community are loathe to see the
government take an active role in future OS development at Microsoft (no matter
how reprehensibly Microsoft behaved in the past), preferring to let the
marketplace make those decisions.

(Anyone writing about politics should disclose their biases, so here are
mine: I was born and raised in a liberal, union "Humphrey DFLer" home
in Minnesota, and I've been known to occasionally pitch a tent at a Finnish
co-op camp where Gus Hall made his start. I've never voted for a Republican.)

It's unclear whether this is a real movement or some wacko proposal by some
fringe open sourcers; at the present it's more a concept than an actual call to
arms, and so far the leaders in the open-source community have been silent on
the issue. (Indeed, noted libertarian Eric Raymond must be in serious conflict
over this proposal: the open-source advocate in him wants to see open-source
software advanced at any cost, but the libertarian in him wants to see
government disappear.) But realistically, the idea of using government to
mandate the usage of open-source software is doomed to fail. The only mystery
is whether any government body in the world will actually give the idea a
hearing.